Pam Belluck

Pam Belluck is a health and science writer for The New York Times. She writes about many different subjects, often concerning complex or controversial topics, including fetal surgery, hospital delirium, paying patients to take medication, the donation of H.I.V.-infected organs, the science of musical expression and how the morning-after pill really works.

Her interests range quite literally from head to toe — from the “not tonight dear” signal sent by chemicals in women’s tears to the discovery of the world’s oldest leather shoe (size 7, right foot, preserved for 5,500 years under layers of sheep dung).

Her article about experiments scientists conduct using their own children as subjects was selected for The Best American Science Writing 2010.

Ms. Belluck’s first book, "Island Practice”, about an eccentric doctor and the adventures and challenges of his community on the island of Nantucket, was published in June 2012. A month later, her book was optioned for a television series by Fox Television and Imagine Television, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer’s production company.

A New York Times interview with Ms. Belluck about her book can be found here.

Also in June 2012, Ms. Belluck was the subject of an extended profile in Current Biography magazine.

Ms. Belluck’s reporting launched The Times’s Vanishing Mind series, about Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. For the first story, she traveled to mountain villages outside Medellin, Colombia, and wrote about an extraordinary extended family of 5,000 people, the world’s largest family to experience Alzheimer’s. Subsequently, the federal government awarded a grant to an unprecedented project to test a drug on the Colombian family to see if Alzheimer’s can be prevented. Also for the series, Ms. Belluck traveled to South Korea and Arizona, and spent time in a California men’s prison where first-degree murderers care for inmates with dementia. Several stories have been accompanied by groundbreaking multimedia projects produced with colleagues in the Times’s photo, video and multimedia departments.

In addition to her writing at The Times, Ms. Belluck conducts interviews for the weekly Science Times podcast.

Ms. Belluck joined The Times in 1995 as a general assignment reporter on the metropolitan desk, served as the bureau chief in Queens, and briefly covered education in New York City. She was a key member of the team covering the Oklahoma City bombing and the crash of TWA Flight 800.

In 1997, she became the Midwest bureau chief, based in Chicago and covering 11 states. In late 2001, she became the New England bureau chief, based in Boston. As a national bureau chief, she covered some of the biggest news stories, including the clergy sex abuse scandal in the Catholic church, the Rhode Island night club fire that killed 100 people, the introduction of same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, and the passage of a landmark Massachusetts law requiring health insurance coverage for nearly everyone — which became the model of the national health care law.

While a national correspondent, Ms. Belluck frequently worked on in-depth projects, exploring the demolition of a notorious public housing project in Chicago, the underpinnings of the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, problems with the nation’s food-safety system, and the challenging life of a family coping with a mentally ill child.

She was drawn to offbeat subjects as well: floating islands, truck stop evangelists, a North Dakota mayor who won election in a coin flip, and the longest place name in the country: Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. A story about the sport of fish shooting was selected for The Best American Sports Writing 2005.

In 2007, Ms. Belluck was awarded a Knight Fellowship to spend a year studying science journalism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. In 2009, she began covering health and science for The Times.

Her work has won several awards, and she was twice part of teams that were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She graduated with honors from Princeton University with a major in international relations and a minor in East Asian studies. She was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship. These days, her French and Mandarin are rusty, but she studies Chinese when she can to refresh some of her knowledge of the language.

Prior to joining The Times, Ms. Belluck worked for The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, and as a freelance Southeast Asia correspondent for The San Francisco Chronicle and other newspapers. In the latter post, she wrote stories from China, Burma, South Korea, Thailand and the Philippines, where she once sang Frank Sinatra’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” in order to persuade the Philippine military to take her to a strategically sensitive island in the South China Sea.

Usually, she doesn’t have to sing in the course of reporting stories. But in her spare time, she plays jazz flute and composes music. Her jazz group, Equilibrium, plays regular gigs in New York City.

Ms. Belluck was also The Times’s first national bureau chief to give birth. She and her husband have two children.

February 17, 2015, Tuesday

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies reported Thursday that its burial teams in Guinea have been attacked verbally or physically 10 times a month on average since March.